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About Julie

Julie Heffernan was born in Peoria, Illinois and raised in Northern California. She received a B.F.A., at the University of California, Santa Cruz and an M.F.A. in Painting at the Yale School of Art. Heffernan is a Professor at Montclair State University.

Julie explains the work by saying, “I grew up in the West, so am inclined towards mighty spaces. Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt’s grand landscapes make perfect sense to me. Our family’s version of a cheap vacation was camping in gorgeous National Parks such as Yosemite and Lassen. Like Cole, the places we visited got us as close to god as we could possibly imagine being. At the same time, they represented what we had lost. My recent work is focused on making sense of the world around me after calamities such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. We are slowly making our world unlivable, and I want to bring to the surface the destructive action, waste, and contamination that is generally invisible to us.”

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Recommended by our guest curators

Mary Jane Ansell

Brighton, UK artist

"Julie’s work reminds me of dreamlike images that feel familiar of some distant forgotten past. She creates glorious, richly abundant works, full of allegory and a kind of Mannerist surrealism. Reflecting on everything from environmental to personal issues her self portraits seem to draw deeply from the subconscious."